 All right, well, welcome to the show, Emily. And to get this started, I'm just gonna get straight into it. As one of the leading experts in acceptance commitment therapy, what drew you to this action-oriented approach to psychotherapy? Yeah, yeah, great question. You know, for me, I think a lot of what was out there in terms of self-help, how to be happy in the world. There were a lot of strategies that seemed like they were about eliminating or narrowing things, you know, get this out of your life, try to avoid thinking this way or feeling this way and act for me, at least how I understood it was all about expansion. It was all about building a bigger life. It was all about making more room for your feelings, you know, opening up to your thoughts. And, you know, that just spoke to me, I think on a pretty deep level that there was room to grow. I definitely think that's one of the biggest challenges that we get in a lot of self-help advice or even when friends and family try to support us is they try to narrow down the problem and get you to discount everything else that's going on, including the context of some of these behaviors. So we discuss human behavior on the show consistently and our audience loves learning about their own behavior but also others and how they approach relationships. What is contextualist perspective on our behavior? Because I think this is gonna be a fun jumping off point for the conversation. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I think a lot of folks especially folks that are into self-development, self-improvement, we kind of tend to see ourselves as the change agents of our lives. We see our willpower as the source of change or our changing thoughts or it's all about kind of how it is that we think or drive towards change. And what a contextual perspective suggests is that actually what if all of our behavior, everything that we do, including what we think and what we feel, what if all of that is actually perfectly suited to both the environment that we're in at that moment, the situation that we're in in that moment and our entire history with situations like that. Right, in other words, what if everything, our thoughts, our feelings, our drive, our willpower, our hopes and dreams, as well as our actions, whether or not we exercise or walk the dog or clean the house, what if all of that was sort of pulled for and stoked and nurtured by the environment we're in. Well, there would be two implications, right? Or many implications, but two of the main ones would be first that everything that you're doing right now, the stuff that you would love to change, the stuff that you'd wanna do more of or less of, that everything that you're doing right now is exactly right considering the situation that you're in, right, the context and your history with situations like that. In other words, you've learned the repertoire that you've come to, you've learned perfectly from all of where you've been. For me, this is a really hopeful perspective because then what we need to do is put you in new situations, is change the world so that it can nurture you differently towards things that might be more in line with what you want and who you wanna be. When I think of it that way, I grew up in Detroit and drivers in Michigan very much obey traffic laws. They break at a yellow light, they slow down, they let people in with a blinker on. Then I moved to LA and I realized just how hairy traffic is and there's a totally different set of rules contextually to me driving in LA. And when I go back to visit my family in Michigan, they're like bracing the dashboard, they're wondering why I'm accelerating through a yellow light, but my behavior has changed in this context here in LA and I've adapted to a driving style that gets me from point A to B without getting stuff in the traffic. And when we think about self-development, we don't often think about those contexts that things are appearing in in our life. We wanna take that agency ourself and try our best to break through whatever that environment is to take action in areas that really impact our lives. Exactly and contextualism doesn't mean that you're helpless, it doesn't mean that you're just gonna be subject to however the wind blows and stop changing and stop aiming for change. In fact, common acceptance and commitment therapy and key in contextualism in the way that it's approached to wellness is this idea that ultimately what we'd want you to build is flexibility, that idea of expanding, expanding the behaviors you have access to, expanding the room for all the different thoughts. We want you to be able to drive one way in LA and one way in Michigan. And sometimes when we get really stuck on this is coming from me, it's my willpower, it's my self-worth, it's my personality, it's my diagnosis, whatever it is, we can actually become more insensitive to those contexts, to where those labels, those ideas about who we are, whatever it is, they might serve in some circumstances. The behaviors might serve in some circumstances, but in other situations, they completely fall flat. And we can take heart to that. Maybe I'm not as competent as I thought I was. Maybe I'm not as good of a driver, as good of a speaker, as good of a friend, as good of a lover. It's pretty easy, this is the back end of this. It's pretty easy when we see ourselves as the only source of our change in our behavior. It can be easier than blame ourselves in ways that aren't useful when things don't go right. And get stuck in patterns that aren't helpful to us. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. Once that focuses on yourself and not realizing the environmental influence that is being moving and pushing you in directions of behavior that you don't want, you do remove some of that power to actually change it by not thinking about it. Absolutely, absolutely. You know, ultimately, I think we can draw differences between sort of goals that we have for our lives and the way we are in the world that are topographical, that are really about, you know, I need to achieve this thing, there's this specific goal, and other kinds of goals that are more functional, maybe more like our values that can be these sort of driving principles. And the thing about driving principles, once we step away from what that goal looks like, what the specific objective is, and instead orient towards those overarching values, one thing that that promises that approach is that our behavior is gonna have to look different when the situation looks different. It's gonna have to be responsive to this crazy changing world around us so that we can be responsive to it and continue to develop into the person that we wanna be. I feel there's also a healthy dose of self-compassion that has to come into the fold here when we really think about the environmental impact and sexualization of our behaviors and actions. I'm so glad you said that. There's something about like zooming it out and seeing what you've done or what you've not done in context and seeing how clearly it makes sense that you would have done or not done that. For example, you know, I work with folks all the time who will kinda say, you know, I look around and I see people doing this thing, whatever it is, you know, exercising every day or I see people making wise investments or I see people making new connections or really demonstrating their ambition and following through on that and why not me. And you know, you can sort of zoom out then and look at how the situation hasn't nurtured you to do that. Like where was it that you suppose you were supposed to have learned that? Can you zoom out and sort of look at your experience and can we see a time when that would have been learned? You know, for most of us when we do that it makes a lot of sense that we never got the opportunity to try that on, to contact trial and error, to figure out what works and doesn't work for us in that situation. And of course the same thing is true of behaviors that we want to stop, right? If we can zoom out and see when are they more likely? When are they less likely? Then, you know, I think it does position us to treat ourselves with a bit more kindness because it's not indicative of our worth. It's indicative of us perfectly responding to the context in which we find ourselves. Our producer Michael shared a quote around contextualism that I thought would be really funny to share with our audience and talk about, every problem has once been a solution. And when we think about this for some of our clients, you know, the solution in the past to their boredom or their social anxiety going to events and meeting people has been to pull out their phone. And then they'll realize that, well now the phone has actually become the problem because it's satiated that anxiety but it hasn't allowed them to move closer to their core values or their goals for themselves of meeting more people, building better relationships, being more social. When we think about it in this viewpoint, you know, this phone example, how can we start to bring contextualism in to change this behavior in ourselves? So I have a way of sort of thinking about problems versus, you know, not problem behaviors. And that's really in terms of the relationship between the context and the behaviors we have access to. When I say the behaviors we have access to, I mean, the choices, the things we could do easily that other people could see and perceive but also our own thoughts, also our own feelings. And if our goal is flexibility, if our goal is breath, you know, then when we think of what we want for folks, what we'd want for the person who tends to pull out their phone in social situations, what we'd want for them is we'd want the phone to be available. But that's a choice that they have. That's something they have access to. You know, they could do that, but also that there's a whole range of other behaviors that they could engage in as well. You know, there's this behavior that might have certain pluses and minuses, certain costs and certain benefits, but they also have access to a tons of other things that they could do. And in my work, we refer to that relationship when context really pulls for a big broad repertoire for really what we might experience as freedom, right? Like what do we mean when we say we're free? We mean I could do anything. You know, I suddenly have a cancellation. I've got a whole hour where nobody needs me to be somewhere. That same sort of experience of freedom. We refer to that in my work as a petitive conditions. So a petitive coming from the same word as appetite, right? Another way that you might think about it is a nurturing environment. So when a petitive or nurturing environment, and that's gonna look different for everybody, right? An a petitive or a nurturing environment is an environment in which all of your needs are met, in which the resources that are available in that environment are really well matched with what your needs are. Again, in that environment, right? Our needs might change in different contexts. It's all like very specific to the individual and to the circumstance. The other hand, of course, we can imagine those needs not being met. We might call those environments more aversive. You know, they're not nurturing environments. They're suffering environments. They're environments that promote suffering. And that we would expect that the more fundamental needs that are not met, or the more that the resources that are available in any one context are not matching well with the needs that are uniquely and personally ours, just from our history and our time in the world, to the extent that the environment is not meeting those needs, then we might have what we would call problems, right? To the extent that the environment is aversive or promoting suffering, that what that's a matter of is us missing out on some of those needs. And so our job, you know, with respect to ourselves ends up being creating a context that nurtures. It means knowing ourselves, knowing how our needs take shape, you know, across a couple of different domains. I mean, just across the board and psychology, there's plenty of folks that have talked about needs. The way that I think about it here would be in terms of sort of basics, physiological and health and wellness needs. And every single person, there'll be some stuff that just humans need, but also every single person has unique health and wellness needs, unique biological needs that are gonna change over the course of a day and different contexts over the course of their lives. So we have basic physiological needs. We have belonging and intimacy needs. We have needs with respect to our relationship with ourselves, how we're growing or feeding or nurturing ourselves. And then with respect to those big sort of purposes like our values. And I don't think about these hierarchically necessarily. It's not like you can't care about purpose if you're hungry, but rather that all of them can be me meant or not meant to different levels. So in any one situation, if I'm seeing your behavior kind of shut down and you not have access to a lot of things, you're not experiencing freedom. The thing that you're highly likely to do anytime you get in a social situation is pull out your phone maybe. Then I'd be asking myself, what needs are not being meant there? What are you likely to do in nurturing environments that's not accessible to you here in this environment? And how could we resource you then in that social situation to where some of those behaviors that are you being your best AJ that some of those behaviors would be available to you? So yeah. I think we should define the idea of access and the behaviors that you have access to because I might have it wrong myself. Now I'm going to summarize what I think it is and please tell me if I have this correctly. I think a lot of people would think that they have access to all behaviors. However, if they haven't learned that skill, if they haven't internalized that skill routine, behavior, habit, well then I don't think they do have access to it. They can't access it by learning it, by reading about it and then putting it into practice. And of course with acceptance, commitment, therapy, AJ and I love it and make sure that it is in all of our programs because it is about taking action. So do I have that correct for our audience to understand the freedom of sure you may think you have access to do anything that you want but if you haven't learned it, well then you really don't because I think all of our audience who get involved in self-development, there are certain concepts and ideas that when you don't have access to them, you view them in one way. When you do have access with them, you see the world in a completely different way. Yeah, Johnny, thank you so much. Almost, so yeah, we've got to learn them. We've got to do what we might call internalizing, getting lots of practice with feedback to where it's perfectly suited for us, for how that's gonna look on us, whether it's being more assertive or managing our time better, it might look different on everybody. But also I would say access changes with context. This is part of the kind of radical idea of contextualism. How many of us have been in this situation and had an idea of exactly what we would like to be doing and yet sit there frozen, right? So I might have my phone out and I might be scrolling and going, I don't know why I'm scrolling. This is terrible. I would love to talk to that woman. Gosh, she looks so funny, you know? And I'm sitting there scrolling and I might even be able to imagine in another situation if I only had blank or if there was something else going on here, if I had dressed differently, maybe I wouldn't feel this way. So I think this is part of the thing that's unique about contextualism is the idea that if you think of every behavior you could possibly engage in, everything you've ever done in your whole entire life, that that actually sort of narrows and broadens, it shrinks and grows as we get into different situations. To understand that the behaviors that allow them to feel like a high value individual, that can shrink and because they don't have access to those behaviors in maybe a social situation, a social context, they're now operating at maybe at a supplicative level or at a standoffish level. Yeah, absolutely. Or whatever it looks like on them, right? Like it might be that when I'm in a social situation, if that's aversive to me or a suffering environment for me, it may be that I end up getting really big and loud and take a lot of attention and I'm not as sensitive to the fact that somebody's starting to cringe a little bit or maybe trying to get away, right? So it doesn't necessarily look small, but functionally, my experience would be that I don't have a lot of choice. This is great because for a lot of our audience who do suffer from social anxiety, a lot of times they're like, I don't understand it. I'm fine in these situations, but I'm not here. And in the weeds of trying to figure out what the situation is, and it's like, you just don't have access to those behaviors in this context, so you must learn to be able to access them in this context. Absolutely, and how would you learn that? Well, that context, it doesn't only change, shrink and grow what behaviors you have access to. What's shrinking and growing in the context is the resources. So we would say that in particular context, you're under-resourced. If you can't access behaviors that you can do in this other context, you're under-resourced. Interesting choice of words there. Yeah, well, you know, for me, I think what it is is it allows us to claim that as our own, but also the context is explicit there. The environment isn't resourcing you. You are under-resourced. It also allows us then to acknowledge what are our basic resources? How much sleep do I need? How much do I need to move my body? How much contact with loved ones? How much physical touch do I need? How much time do I need to spend in recreation? And recognize that even the same context, something that looks exactly the same, if I'm under-resourced in some of those basic ways, I might not even be able to access the same thing I did yesterday in this very same context. Today, I might not be able to access it because my needs are higher than the resources that it takes to engage in that behavior. So anytime we're doing something hard, us calling it hard is also saying, I'm gonna need extra resources on board to be able to navigate this. So in moving from that situation where you're in an environment, networking environment or a party where you know no one or you were invited by someone and now they're off talking to other people and you're on your own, and you know that this is an environment that you've suffered in in the past. And what ends up happening with a lot of our clients is they go home, they get very frustrated with themselves and they start researching, they find the podcast, they look for tips and strategies and tactics to use, but tactics don't get you beyond that context. They're helpful, but often when you're under resourced and in a place of internal suffering, you're not gonna be able to do the tactics or strategies that you're learning from the podcast. So with that, what is the best way for us to start to learn to apply those strategies? Do we start in a more comfortable and nurturing context and environment first and bring them in there with people we know and we feel friendly with and start to learn to bring them into more challenging contexts and environments for us? Or do we throw ourselves in the deep end and say, you know what, the next time I go to this event, I'm just gonna do it and push through? I think a lot of that might depend on our style, you know? I'm not gonna say that one strategy that would be right for everybody. What I would say is depending on which strategy, which approach would be right for everybody, that would speak to how many resources we might need to have on board in order to encounter that challenge. So maybe it might be that, and really it's almost the same thing. So let me talk you through it. So if we say on the one hand, the approach could be try on some of these new strategies in an environment that's already really a petitive, it's already really nurturing, right? So you are bringing in a new thing, but there's some naturally occurring resources that are in that environment. That's why we're calling it nurturing, right? I could say also, well, there's this work party, so I don't get to try it out with a nurturing environment first. So we'd say, what can we do beforehand during to make it as nurturing as possible? And it literally might be as simple as, okay, when I am in a nurturing environment, when I'm preparing to be in a nurturing environment, what kind of things am I likely to do naturally with respect to my biological needs, my belonging needs, my self growth needs or interpersonal growth needs and my values or purpose? What are the activities that I naturally kind of do when the environment is nurturing? And that can often point us to what the needs are. We might notice that in an environment that causes us to suffer, that we tend to not eat as well. We eat trash or we skip a meal or we overeat. We might notice we don't move as well, right? We tend to overexercise or under exercise. We might withdraw or we might engage in really shallow social stuff that just kind of gets us away. But looking at, for me, what are the activities that I'm likely to engage in? What are the resources that I naturally contact without even thinking about it in a situation that is safe and nurturing for me? And then how can I bring those to bear then in the situation that's more challenging? It may be spending some time with a friend to pre-party that party and really getting in my skin. It may be making use of a family member who could really help me dress in a way that I feel proud because in most nurturing situations when they are nurturing, I love to dress up and to really show my confidence and my appearance. That doesn't naturally show up in this other environment. It's more of a suffering environment but maybe I could resource myself to really be able to do that. Maybe in a nurturing environment, I'm sort of grazing and eating freely. I might intentionally visit the table at the party and make myself have a couple of bites. I say make myself. Ideally, we'd want it to be kind. We'd want it to be an act of self-compassion. I'm like, oh, you're really getting stuck here. Maybe I need to feed Emily so that she can be better resource for this interaction. I feel that developing that level of self-awareness can be a challenge to many when you set very large goals for yourself. So what we find in clients who are perfectionists who expect the world of themselves, when they miss that mark, they tend to shut down and they can't then do even the basics of resourcing that they need for a more nurturing environment. So how can we bring this contextualism into that experience that some in our audience might be feeling around their perfectionism? There's a little sort of trick, I think, of contextualism that contextualism implies, rather, which is sort of like in any one moment, you can't entirely change the context for you in the right now, but you can take care of a future you. And what that points to is some things that are not rocket science and not unique to act and not unique to contextualism. But if I know, for example, that my movement or meditation practice tends to drop out when I get stressed, it just happens, then that might be an important thing to ritualize. Now, the first day that I'm picking where it's gonna be in my schedule and that I'm begrudgingly setting alarms, that's not gonna feel awesome. But for me, and this is actually a personal example, if I wake up at 4.30 in the morning and I do not check my email and I just go and brush my teeth and wash my face, I get on my mat every single day. Every single day, if I do that. That's something that past Emily set up, that past Emily organized, past Emily found the exact right time, it's 4.35, that I can get that extra five minutes in, turns out. Past Emily set it all up, put it all in place and made it really, really easy so that Emily that wakes up every morning, Emily this morning, was able to enter that context that past Emily set up and responded in the way that the history called for. The immediate context was perfect, the alarm was set, the face mask was out, the yoga clothes were out, the mats out, it's easier to go with what past Emily set up with and to let the context pull for it. So creating a nurturing environment, not just in the acute, how can I resource myself for this challenge that's coming up? But how can I build my life in such a way that it nurtures me, that that learning that Johnny was talking about is something that my world is naturally pulling for. It could be something as simple as making it easy to meet the goals that we have for ourselves, like setting alarms or making the resources that we need accessible, the materials that we need accessible. It could be employing the help of other people. It could be taking the time to sit down and say, what are my interpersonal needs? Never really thought about that. Having a list somewhere, you know, here are 10 easy ways I can resource myself. And my list is gonna be different from yours, AJ, and it's gonna be different from yours, Johnny. You know, and that part for me really comes back to the self-compassion and making your life such that the behaviors, all of the things that you've worked so hard to learn and all of the learning that you have up ahead of you, that that's accessible, that every situation is an opportunity for you to be expanding, for you to be taking on new behaviors, learning new things. That really, I mean, that really puts, gets the oomph behind some of those strategies is, yeah, I got this strategy from a book or from a podcast, and then I worked on it and really found out how it's gonna work for me. You know, my coach gave me this advice, but then I tried it in my life and I was present enough and engaged enough and well-resourced enough to be able to really tweak it until it worked for me. And what do you say to the skeptic who says, oh, well, this is just blaming the environment or making excuses around resources when you should just be doing these behaviors and actions. You know what's good for you. Well, two reactions, like one, I feel sort of sad for that person that their context has taught them that they are responsible 100% for everything that they experience, and that they should be expected to be able to engage in any behavior that is the quote, right behavior in any situation. That seems like a difficult row to hoe. I also find myself wondering like that must have worked out for that person in their life. It must be that they have been well-resourced in lots of situations to be able to engage in behaviors and to be able to have access to any behavior they put their mind to. And that sounds really lovely. I doubt that if most of us check in with our experience, it seems like that's often more aspiration than reflective of what we've experienced. You brought up advice and I feel that many of us are not only trying to change ourselves but often find ourselves in situations trying to change the people around us, the people we care about and love. And again, coming back to the earlier discussion, we often do this through stories and our stories are a summation of our resources, our context in that moment and our past experiences that brought us there doesn't often overlap or relate necessarily to the person we're giving advice to or we're trying to help sort through the issues that they're having. If they asked us for that support or if maybe we did it unsolicited. So how can we be more influential with those around us now taking contextualism into the picture? The question that I find myself asking folks who I'm trying to help in lots of different contexts, certainly my clients, but also my coworkers, my students, my colleagues, my supervisees or consultees, how can I resource you? Is there, I wonder, how can we resource you to be able to get that thing that you want? Do you have a sense of what it is that you want here? Can you imagine what behaviors you'd like to have access to if you could just shoot them magically into your, that you in that situation or those kinds of situations? And if so, how can we resource you? We might even go through some specific resources. So tell me if we think about biologically, you've been taking care of your body, how are you doing with that? You know, is there anything I can do to support you with that? How about, you know, interpersonally, how you're belonging needs? Are you getting some time in? That's a common, I mean, if I could, it's so odd when people first come into the communities that I work in to hear us talk like that. But yet you know exactly what it means when somebody asks you, you know, what resources can I offer? In your experience, Emily, for a lot of the young people that AJ and I speak to, they've been in our classes. And when I ask them those questions about what is it that they wanna learn or what are the goals that they have ahead of them, I have noticed that a lot of younger people, they haven't thought about that. And in fact, to me, and maybe this is just the experience that I've had with it, maybe your experience is different, but on top of that, they really haven't thought through their emotions of what is on the other side of those. They seem to be, in today's age, very reactive to everything. And then when things don't go their way, rather than working through something, it's now about occupying their time, drifting, canceling it out and getting involved in something else. And with social media and all the technology, they can do that forever. Part of what you're pointing to is like, you have to have a certain experience with being able to resource yourself in order to be able to name, you know, what resources you need and actually orchestrate getting them. But there's a whole learning process in that. When you were talking about sort of generational differences, I find myself thinking, yeah, how has their history been different? You know, I didn't grow up at a time where I had to contend with social media. Like I think I was in high school when AOL came out. You know, I can't even imagine. You know, if we think about the threats, you know, and needs and resources that appear, it suddenly allows in any moment for you to have be accessible and potentially be in a challenging situation and suddenly need resources that you wouldn't have any idea to expect that you needed. Well, we talked about here how the phone was the solution that's not a problem. And I have said this on the podcast many times and this is something that is so simple and it is in everybody's lives and we've grown up in two different generations. And I use this example of going to the bank and then it's busy and then you have to stand in line. And when you didn't have a cell phone, you had to stand there and deal with yourself. You had to figure out how you felt, what was going on, what are you making for dinner? You're in thought, you're checking in. You're being reflective in that moment and now it is getting in line, well, if you're even in line, but you pull out your phone and start swiping, instantly distracted from an opportunity to check in with yourself. We had those check-ins all day every day and now they're becoming more rare, which leads to, in asking these questions, what is it that you want? What do you want to learn? What are you excited about? What are you interested in? And I get a lot of times I get, you know, I'm not really sure. I haven't really thought about it. And just from my experience, at a very early age, I was obsessed with music, as you could tell. And so, I never had that question. It was my curiosities and interests and aspirations were right there in front of me. And I would be happy to discuss this. I just don't know from our young folks. Well, there's so much to contend with right now. I mean, if I think about the last couple of decades, I've got two 15-year-old boys that are still in the house and a 21-year-old non-binary child. And I think about my 15-year-old boys, the history that they've had coming up and where they're landing right now at 15, they haven't had the opportunities that you're talking about, Johnny, those opportunities to pause and to be with themselves. There's so much stimulation all the time. And not only that, but the access to information is so broad that there are literally things ready to sort of not meet your needs, you know, or to suppress or to hide your needs. That's available 24 hours a day. And in any situation, you have this way to ignore the needs. So a first thing that I might wanna train somebody is can you tell what's resourcing? Can you feel when you're well-resourced? Can you in your own, you know, in your own behavior, in your own repertoire, can you feel what constriction feels like? Can you feel what openness feels like? Can you feel freedom? Can you notice, you know, when you are feeling more free? Just that discrimination is the very first piece. And I might stop there, like go out in your life and spend some time noticing, is this am I well-resourced right now? And if not, is there a tiny acute need that I can name? And if I'm engaged in a behavior, I can ask myself, is this resourcing me? I mean, I remember a few years ago I was, I started keeping books on my phone like I had the Kindle app and I started keeping little novels on my phone because I've realized that what was happening is I would have this little stretch of time and then I would start scrolling, you know, I get on Facebook or Instagram or whatever and I'd start scrolling and I might spend 10, 15 minutes. You know, not a huge amount of time. I don't have a huge amount of time. But at the end of that, I was not more resourced than I was 10 or 15 minutes ago. If somebody came up to me and said, here's 10 magic minutes where you don't have to be anywhere. Nobody's expecting anything of you. You know, with that kind of intention, now go and resource yourself. I mean, I could tell you 15 things right now that I'd like to play my ukulele. I'd like to snuggle with my cat. I'd like to walk my dog. I'd like to just go outside and be in the sun for a minute, you know? And yet like we can take that 10 or 15 minutes and completely miss, not check in on what needs we have on board, not check in on activity we have is engaging and resourcing us or not. So for me, what I ended up doing was actually, I didn't even take Facebook off my phone. I just gave myself another choice and I made it to where they were right next to each other. So every time I went to kind of get on the social media, there was the Kindle app. You know, there was the book app right next to it. And I would sort of go, is what I need right now? What scrolling has to offer me? Sometimes you might need to turn your brain off, you know? Is that what I need? Or could it be cool to spend 10 minutes reading this little, you know, this little bit of a novel? I mean, I was reading novels. Like I don't have time to read novels. That's the story I tell myself. And yet, like I was putting away, you know, a couple of novels a month, just without making any special time to read, just saying, okay, before I make this choice, I'm gonna make it a real choice, right? So the first thing might be, what do I feel like when I'm resourced and not resourced and building that skill? And then setting up the environment, right? Putting the Kindle app right next to the Facebook app and setting up the environment to where those resources are salient. One resource is Facebook. It's not very resourcing. The other resource for me was that Kindle app. It actually was a lot more resourcing for me. One of the experiences that I've had working with our clients, especially the younger ones like Johnny, and I share this story with our clients of, you know, being on this path that my family defined success as becoming a doctor. And as I got into graduate school, I just really realized that it was not resourcing me in any way and struggle with imposter syndrome. And I made a choice to move closer towards my core values than the goals that my family had set out for me and the story that they created around those goals with my experience going through the education system. And I'll hear time and time again from clients who are feeling that same pressure from their parents around, be the doctor, be the lawyer, be the engineer, not feeling in any way, shape or form that that's truly what they want and so adrift from their core values because they're moving towards someone else's goal. And oftentimes are told, I don't care if you're under resourced or not. Like that's the key to success. Why are you worried about resourcing? Like you just need to take another step closer to the goal. And in sharing this story, you know, I'll also hear, well, I could never do that. My family would disown me or they would not be happy. And in all of the stories that they then tell themselves of why they have to stay on this track, they know internally is not for them. That is under resourcing them and then leading them so far from even being able to define their core values. And I'd love to hear your perspective on this as you not only have children but also work with graduate students and undergrads who are living this experience as we speak. Absolutely. Oh gosh. And it's such a common experience. It shows up in the clinic all the time. It shows up certainly, especially in grad school or in undergrad. It's this academic environment. Everybody's got expectations. And then of course, as you're talking, I'm going, have I done that with my kids? Where have I done that with my kids? I try really hard not to. It's such an important piece. A couple of things come to mind. One is I think a lot of people find themselves in this situation where this person's hopes and dreams for me are so big and they're the opposite. Their disappointment in me is so big and so salient to me. It feels so here and present. And as Johnny was mentioning, I might not be as in contact with what my own hopes and dreams were. My history may not have nurtured that in me. I may not have been well-resourced to know what I really hope for, what I really dream about, how I see myself. If my history hasn't picked that, hasn't nurtured that, then that would be at a loss. That would be something that would be really difficult. And maybe I don't even know what is hard for me or what would make me sad or disappointed. And so if you're here and you've got all these big feelings about it and when somebody goes, well, what do you want? You go, oh, you know, a lot of times it feels the lesser risk to trust the other person whose feelings are bigger, whose hopes and dreams are clearer. You know, it can feel a lot easier to do that even though it's not resourcing. One thing that I end up telling parents sometimes or telling graduate students sometimes is something like, you know, there are plenty of really, really unhappy people with PhDs. There are plenty of really, really unhappy medical doctors, you know, that turns out that we can have something that everybody in the world would look at and point to and say, that is what success is. And we could be not meeting any of our needs. I mean, literally none, you know, including basic, you know, needs. I mean, we could be not feeding our body, not sleeping, you know, not moving our bodies in ways that grow us. You know, reminding folks, I think when they're in the position of being subject to those, you know, sorts of opinions, big opinions, big ideas about me that they might actually need a stretch of time where what we're resourcing is the pursuit of a relationship with themselves. Who am I? What do I hope for? We might need to try on some things that you never thought you would like, you know? Just to try some stuff and see how it suits you. That is certainly incredibly important. I don't think you're gonna be happy in life unless you're evolving in the way that you need to be evolving. And for AJ and I both, when we first learned about core values and arranging your week to be engaging in those core values and then using those core values to guide you, changed the way that I looked at each and every day. It changed the way that I looked at the future. And then of course, those core values and how I engage them have been able to change over time in certain ways, but it's always been towards the main goal, backwards engineered in the steps that it's going to take to reach that goal and the core values that I wanna embody and engage in to reach that goal. And once that had taken shape, then my days became consistent and how do I maximize the enhancement of each and every day? And then it, so for me, which is great because my work is something that I love, AJ and I have put this together because we were, this excited us. So to be able to then maximize those values in the work that we're doing and then enhancing that life. Once that happens, it's easy to go to bed because you're excited for each and every day. There's something that people sometimes can miss there in that you can have all of those, all of those needs are important. So you can have something that nominally, logically fits with your core values. You know, let's say a job that you love, but if you're under resourcing yourself and expecting that it's gonna be enough that just the job at some point you decided that job was perfect for you and it fits with your core values, but you haven't arranged the context to support you actually contacting those values that you are not resourcing yourself in some of those other ways. So for example, I have graduate students all the time that sit down and go, I'm so frustrated with my thesis and I'm just not being inspired by it anymore. And I don't know if psychology is for me after all. And we might pause and they're often surprised when the first thing I ask is like, how are you sleeping? You know, are you getting some rest? And I'm wondering like, what's your eating look like? Cause I see you in the lab a lot and I see you in class and you're doing this practicum. Like, do you get food or, you know, how are we feeding you? What about interpersonal connection? You know, so it might be that you hate psychology now or wanna do something completely different and are just coming into contact with how this isn't meeting some core values, but it also might be that you're so under-resourced that you're not able to contact some of the resources that are there, you know, so you might actually need to provide yourself some support and love in some of these other domains so that you can continue to contact what's really important there and be, like you said, optimizing, you know, how it is in every choice. You know, one of the things that happens, I think when people start to move in this direction towards creating nurturing context for themselves and start to sort of feel themselves grow towards flexibility, one of the things that happens is you start to realize how many choices you make in a day, you know, cause when you're experiencing them as actual choices, remember that experience of freedom, when you're experiencing them as actual choices, then suddenly there's just one behind the other, one behind the other. And that's what opens the door to understanding what choices are leading you to your goals and values and which ones are not. And when that happens, it's quite mind-blowing because you're like, whoa, I've been choosing wrong and how long have I been choosing wrong? Then begin making those decisions to go towards your goals, towards your values. You then will start to see, talk about context, the community that you've surrounded yourself with and whether or not they're supportive of the changes and the choices that you need to be making in order to be resourced. And sometimes you might even find yourself in a position where you go, this choice would grow me this way, this choice would grow me this other way, this choice would grow me this other way. Which way do I wanna grow? That is a well-resourced human and the moment that you can go, you know, is what I wanna do is confront this person and really grow in my being assertive and advocating for myself is what I wanna do is set this aside and draw a boundary and grow like that aspect of my social navigation is what I need to do is go to the gym and take the rest of the day off and really grow in my capacity to respond to my acute needs and then resource myself that way, that kind of choice, that kind of freedom. The funny thing, I mean, the really paradoxical thing about this whole orientation is how empowering that is. We started by saying that we have this fantasy that we are in charge of all of our behaviors. We have this fantasy that it's all up to our drive and our willpower and having the right personality and the right tips and tricks or the diagnoses under control or whatever. And that if we pause and let the context, you know, let the role of context be apparent to us, one of the things that actually ends up happening as we get better and better and better at this is that we really come to feel our own power. We really come to feel our own freedom and that illusion of agency that we talked about, you know, is more real than ever and more effective than ever. It's a funny trick, you know, to let go of being the ultimate source of control of everything in our lives actually empowers us to have the experience of lots of control and that we could kind of do anything. I couldn't agree more and I made a major change in my life in quitting drinking, tied to starting a family and health. And what I realized was contextually, environment was not right for me. So going out, staying out late in bars if I'm not drinking, not good for me making good choices. And also some people were not good for me in that environment, in that context. It doesn't mean that I remove that person from my life. It just means that I need to hang out with them in a different context where we're doing something healthy, where we're grabbing lunch or a cup of coffee and I'm not putting myself in that position that I know is gonna lead to me staying out later and feeling bad the next day, missing the gym, maybe eating something poor because the only thing available at 2 a.m. is, you know, taco trucks here in LA. That's the level that I think, especially for our younger audience, they don't often realize. Now, my core values have shifted and changed, you know, it's starting this company, being social and being a night owl, like that was core to my identity and core to me helping provide service to all of the clients who had come out to LA to work with us. And now reorienting my life around, okay, starting a family, wanting to be there for my kids, really caring about my physical health to be there for my kids. You know, that allowed me to change my core values. And I think what we often hear from our audience when we get into core values and we talk about this on every act episode we do is, well, how do I choose them? Like, you know, every core value on this list is something that I really aspire to. And then, well, what happens if I choose the wrong ones? And those two questions just go sort of hand in hand and we often hear from our audience, well, you know, I didn't move forward or I have 20 and now I don't know how to set goals and I don't know how to involve this in every day in my life. So what is your advice there, understanding the value of core values for those who might be early in their experience of shifting from goals to values? I love the kind of orienting people towards investigating and experimenting in their own lives, you know? So for me, it's like, whoa, okay, 20 of these feel compelling. Well, you got some work to do. You know, let's go out and let's engage each of these sort of in turn, let's spend some time with each of these, let's try them on and see which version of you you've fallen in love with, you know? Where is it worth the work? Where is it if you could set this and orient towards that way of being in the world that it would make sort of the struggle of being alive worth it, that it would motivate you and orient you. And it doesn't mean that then you wouldn't suffer, you know, it means that in the moments that pain is available, in the moments that pain is where you're at or the environment is painful, that it's worth it to orient and resource yourself to be able to pursue that value. You know, so I think sometimes we have the sense that there's a right one and if we don't pick it right, like we have to discover, like uncover the value, it's in there somewhere and we might be fooled or something, but I think you make a good point in saying, you know, this can change and shift and it should in a contextual sense, if values like anything else are sensitive to context, then as our experiences grow, as our life continues, then our values will shift with our experience. I've certainly heard folks, you know, suggest that values should be the thing that kind of carries over into any context or, you know, that carries over over time. And I think some people have that experience. You know, for me, I think for a while now, although it means something different than I'm noticing, as I say, it means something different than when I first said it, but I remember around 2005 or something, I started saying that the thing that I really care about is to make spaces around me where people can do extraordinary things, like for themselves, you know, whatever it is that is extraordinary to them, like I wanna be a context where people can do things that feel extraordinary, that are beyond the ordinary for them. One thing that I can notice is that, you know, I happen to be in a graduate program where we were doing act, where there was lots of work that encouraged us to put words around our values. That means something completely different to me today than it did 17 years ago, completely different. So even if the words are the same, you know, what comes to mind, what it feels like and what it looks like in my everyday life has shifted. So to the individuals who aren't sure or who find that sort of bewildering, you know, what do I value? I'd say like, let's go on a values adventure, you know, let's see what that would look like on you, whatever the value is, you know, being compassionate or hardworking or see what that value would look like on you, in your world as it is, how you would have to resource it and pick, you know, you get to pick. That is true, you do get to pick and I love trying all of these values out. Speaking of extraordinary, we love asking each of our guests what their X factor is, what makes you unique and extraordinary in your own right? What do you think your X factor is, Emily? You know, I think I've gotten pretty good over the years at meeting people where they are and sort of joining with folks where they're at and even if that's a place of great suffering and really meeting them there and being able to connect with them. It's something that I care about deeply and is actually like a fundamental part of that whole thing of creating spaces where they can be extraordinary. You know, we gotta be willing to be with folks in the suffering places in order to nurture them into bigger and bigger lives. Absolutely, and given the permission to be extraordinary at times. Thank you so much for joining us. This is a beautiful conversation and I know our audience is gonna get a ton of value out of contextualism and resourcing and looking at potential problems or frustrations they have in their light in a different lens. So we really appreciate it, Emily. Thanks so much. Thank you.